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By the way, it feels better after that rant, but don't want to hurt anyone's feelings or upset anyone. So please take it as venting of more accumulated frustration of being stuck with an old shopping cart dinosaur while others are starting awesome sites with modern functionality... at basically the click of a few buttons.
Do not allow my post to take anything away from the fact that I'm forever grateful to the people on this forum for helping over the years. :hug::bow:
Thank you.
I just realized the first post should have mentioned this request is because of finding that CREATE_ACCOUNT_SUCCESS is the biggest source of abandoned carts and logged in user exit page. They get there, then give up.
I believe you've misunderstood me.
In my experience VERY FEW ever say "oh, I should go create an account first, lemme click 'create account' before I go shopping". Why would they create account with no purpose?
You said I'm in the dark ages because I'm "wrong" on this point, and you were assuming that I think everyone WANTS to create an account. But I don't. I personally hate creating accounts, and would prefer that every ecommerce system didn't force account-creation on anyone.
I think we're on the same page but somehow not seeing it.
I'm surprised at this, because none of my stats show that. I've not seen any empirical evidence to support that. Mostly because majority of people follow "a)" below, not "b)" as you seem to be suggesting.Quote:
Originally Posted by pricediscrimination
The create-account flow has two outcomes:
a) if they're actively shopping and want to checkout, and need an account, then at the end of create-account it takes them back to where they were in the checkout process. No interruption to checkout.
b) if they're *not* in the midst of checkout, as I said above, they rarely say "oh, I should create an account first". But if they did, then they probably weren't engaged in "shopping" the same way as most product-based stores.
The "success page" was added because:
If the customer is creating an account for other purposes than shopping, such as perhaps signing up for information and newsletters, or being part of an insiders-club, then being redirected to the Home Page after creating an account was "shocking" to them and they were telling shopowners that they thought their account was NOT created successfully.
So, the page is there to make the account-creation-without-being-in-checkout more friendly.
(And the only reason their address details are shown there "to confirm" is so the page has "something" on it. You could very easily put a list of products on that page instead of (or in addition to) displaying their address.
Anyway, clearly you're reacting from frustration and many of your comments sound like you're making sweeping absolute statements based on things within your own world as a storeowner, and that's fine, but there are dozens of other perspectives that other storeowners have for their unique businesses. Zen Cart has grown over the years to accommodate the majority of these various perspectives. You are of course free to change the functionality so that it best suits your needs.
Thank you so much for your mature and open-minded reply. I wouldn't have blamed you if you ignored this thread haha.Quote:
Originally Posted by DrByte
You have a good point about customers potentially wondering if their account was created, but that could also be an old design flaw. Most newer style sites have other indicators that your account was created: for example your name or something in the header, or perhaps it could just redirect you to your account page instead of a double-check-your-address-one-more-time page. Other ways is returning to the homepage with an ajax type indicator welcoming them.
The point is that now, people are used newsletter sign-up/account creation being the same thing. When you actually decide to buy, your address will be input. If you decide to use PayPal, you may never even have to type your address on the store site. So all this address stuff is taking away from the modern day shopping experience in some cases.
Perhaps the best way to solve this and still keep the functionality as Zen Cart intended it, is to keep the CREATE_ACCOUNT_SUCCESS page, remove the address stuff, enter a welcome message, and add product listings below that.
I hope it conveys two important messages, which I'm not sure people always recognize:Quote:
Originally Posted by pricediscrimination
a) The dev team is watching and listening, even if not always participating in, the feedback offered,
b) We want to understand the real business issues behind the requests we get (to work on building the *best* solution instead of just the bandage that is often proposed)
... as well as the breadth of impact of those things (ie: one store vs one thousand stores; or even "bug" vs "bugs-me"), to balance that against the complexity of building/implementing the feature.
Pricediscrimination,
In part sorry for not getting back sooner, I only late last night came across the continuation of "issues" with the suggested modification. I went to test my theory and while it came up different than your testing, it further relayed what DrByte has been discussing. There are several other things to consider, balance, and possibly adjust. For example, if I had navigated to any product, then decided to create an account, the last product to which I had navigated would be where I ended up after creating the account, even if I was at the shopping cart when I chose to create the account. This happening because the shopping cart page does not create a snapshot when being visited (header_php.php action), leading again like in the other thread to a myriad of other modifications necessary for consideration if added in. So it kind of comes down to mapping out what you think should happen based on each possible condition (which there are many) and from there perhaps the next action(s) can be planned. Part of why I say/add that is because I recall in one or more places that some of the header files look back in the history a certain number of records. I can not recall if that is because of the expected sequence of pages or because on the individual page there supposedly were x additional navigation tags entered and the goal was to go back before the first or something similar. Point being that perhaps one condition is corrected but causes another to have a problem.
wow. what a rant.... all for a simple redirect... lot of frustration....
my experience is that ZC is a shopping cart solution. it is there for people to BUY products. people that create accounts and do not buy are generally aghast at the shipping costs of the store.
second, my experience is that ZC is NOT ideal for mass communication with people who sign up for your a store's newsletter. for someone to get onto an email list, they should not have to give up anything besides an email address. no account creation including salutation, name, address information, favorite colour, etc.
and ZC is NOT ideally suited for the collection and management of email addresses, nor the sending of mass emails. people may use it and may make it work, but IMHO, it is not ideally suited for that.
the sending of mass emails is better handled by a program SPECIFICALLY designed for that task. think mailchimp, constant contact, etc. someone enters an email address, the mass mailer sends that email address a confirmation email, the user clicks on that email, and boom, they are on your list.
one needs to integrate a chosen mass marketing solution with ZC to really be effective.
last time i checked, ZC was opensource and frankly, despite one's frustration, i think one can communicate needs, wishes, wants with the dev team in a far more respectful manner.
please reserve one's rants for paid developers....
best.